This volume comprises a selected collection of representative writings of Comrade Vinod Mishra. The writings are drawn primarily from four sources: documents presented and adopted in party conferences and congresses; articles, written originally mostly in English, but also in Hindi and Bengali, for party organs; published and unpublished interviews, and booklets and prefaces to books published by the party press; addresses to seminars, conventions, inner-party and public meetings and party schools and congresses. The period covered runs from the post-Emergency rectification movement when the reorganised party began to emphasise mass political initiatives through the IPF phase when the still underground party played the role of the ideological-political centre and organisational core of an open and legal multi-dimensional all-India political front to the last six years following the party’s coming overground in the Fifth Party Congress held in Calcutta in December 1992.

The selection aims at bringing glimpses of VM’s vast world of Marxist theory and practice. Spread over a dozen different sections, the writings begin with the invoking of the India of VM’s dreams and end with a clarion call for the party of his passion. The compulsion to keep the selections within the bounds of one single volume has meant leaving out at least four to five articles for every piece included. Left out are his entire writings published in Hindi journals "Shramik Solidarity" and "Samkalen Janmat" and English periodicals "Voice of Alternative" and "People’s Front", extensive portions from various documents adopted in party conferences and congresses and minutes of Central Committee and Polit Bureau meetings and a host of other written records.

Even then, readers can clearly get an idea from the present selection about the great volume and variety of VM’s intellectual output during the twenty-odd turbulent years he steered the party ship. And more than that, what stands out singularly in every piece of his writing is the tremendous creative impulse whether we are reading the offbeat "India of My Dreams" or the editorials of Liberation and ML Update.

From the barely legible handwritten manuscripts of the 70s and early 80s produced on a war-footing for the underground press amidst the extreme uncertainty and rigour of underground life to the occasional late-90s articles composed directly on the computer at a relatively relaxed pace, the material environment surrounding his intellectual production did see occasional changes. But writing for him remained for ever a conscious act of class struggle and commanding the creative urge of the writer in VM was the tireless zeal of the revolutionary communist leader in him. In the revolutionary tradition of Marxism, he regarded the struggle of ideas and ideologies as a key component of class struggle and most of his political writings therefore tended to have a polemical character.

Thematically, these writings cover a vast ground, reflecting the long march of the party from a point when it virtually rose from the ashes in the 70s to its confident strides through the crucial ideological challenges of the 80s and 90s. Readers can get a clear glimpse of the steady evolution of the revolutionary line of CPI(ML) in simultaneous struggle with tendencies of both anarchism and ultra-left phrase-mongering on the one hand and capitulationism and petty liberal reformism of social democracy on the other.

At the centre of all his writings lie the party and revolution — not as abstract and perfect ideological products, but as intense and intricate processes of history and society. The party to him is both an organiser and organisation of the proletariat and revolution is both the goal and a growing possibility which informs and guides the continuing metamorphosis of the proletariat from its formative class-in-itself days to the developed class-for-itself phase through relentless contention with the bourgeoisie. Yet these are processes that do not abide by laws of linear progress. The course is zig-zag, the motion is spiral and progress comes more through jerks and breaks, ruptures and leaps than through the smooth constancy of a steady rhythm.

The communist party, VM believed, would lose its raison d’etre if it could not simultaneously prepare the proletariat for its role as the leader of the revolution and also be wielded as a mass revolutionary weapon by proletarian vanguards. Independent political assertion of the proletariat therefore remained the cornerstone of VM’s communism, and he always attached the greatest priority to the task of guarding this essence against every threat of possible dilution, distortion and derailment. For a communist party entrusted with the task of leading a democrtaic revolution in a country with a preponderant agrarian population, any neglect of the task of bringing about proletarian consolidation and a worker-peasant alliance under proletarian leadership can only reduce the proletariat and its potential alliance partner in the peasantry into a passive appendage of the political hegemony of the bourgeois-landlord combine. If this lack of assertion of proletarian independence reflects in a line of class collaboration and acquiescence to bourgeois politics in ordinary times, in crisis times it leads to a virtual state of paralysis. This tragedy was only too evident during the Emergency era in the 70s!

In several of his writings, VM comes back repeatedly to the party’s unfolding history and critically measures the evolution of the party line against the touchstone of practice without ever losing sight of its moorings in Marxism-Leninism. Sometimes urging expansion, sometimes calling for consolidation, he is always fighting for the overall quantitative growth and qualitative development of the party. He has a remarkable knack for every detail, but never misses the wood for the trees. Every aspect of the great mission of building a revolutionary communist party in India’s semi-feudal semi-colonial setting — from developing the appropriate style of work and a vibrant democratic atmosphere inside the party to striving for integration of theory and practice and promotion of greater participation of women at all levels of the party — received his careful and emphatic attention.

Deepening the study of Indian society in the complex interaction of its base and superstructure and thereby perfecting the party’s programmatic understanding of Indian revolution was another constant focus of his intellectual endeavours. While studying the developing situation and the maturing and surfacing of various contradictions and trends, he would always make it a point to follow every lead to go back to the underlying social reality so as to enrich the party’s strategic vision. This stands out in marked and refreshing contrast to the dominant left discourse which generally does not go beyond a superficial liberal and constitutional gaze. Whether it is on the question of caste and class, religion and secularism, tribal autonomy or women’s liberation, VM always brings his deep revolutionary Marxist insight to tear asunder both liberal illusions, commonplace or sophisticated, as well as the cultivated confusion of many an exponent of post-modernism.

In all his theoretical writings, VM stands for a creative integration of the universal revolutionary essence of Marxism-Leninism and Mao’s thought with the concrete Indian reality. This integration is of course a painstaking and continuing process and it can only take place in the backdrop of historical experiences of victorious revolutions, in Russia and China in particular. It was quite natural for communist revolutionaries in India in the 60s to begin with the Chinese model, all the more so because the official communist leadership in India had never paid serious heed to the lessons from China. The attempt to copy the Chinese model revealed most glaringly the peculiarities of the Indian situation and the task of later generations of communist revolutionaries was to suitably adjust and develop the programme and tactical line in consonance with these particularities. This was how, VM believed, revolution in India would evolve its own distinctly Indian path and model.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union and collapse and crisis of the existing models of socialism could not but have greatly stirred VM. Among Indian communist organisations, the CPI(ML) was clearly in the best position to comprehend and withstand the Soviet debacle. While the CPI and CPI(M) were busy singing paeans to Soviet socialism even as the stagnation and degeneration of the Soviet system had begun to trigger its eventual collapse, the CPI(ML) remained all along openly critical in its assessment of the Soviet situation. Yet VM never took the we-told-you-so line of easy escape. In confronting the wave of post-Soviet bourgeois triumphalism, he never belittled the crisis facing the international socialist and communist movement by making it out to be a case of mere failure of applied Marxism. In the true Marxist-Leninist spirit of acknowledging the real problem, he went on to identify the challenge of making an in-depth study of the laws of motion of the socialist mode of production, a task, he saw as being comparable in its dimensions only to Marx’s historic study of the capitalist mode as in Capital.

In sum, VM’s selected writings represent a jargon-free, straightforward and self-critical autobiographical odyssey of the Indian communist movement in the last quarter of the twentieth century. As a post-Independence Marxist who read his Marx, Lenin and Mao in the spring thunder of Naxalbari and its roaring reverberations across the flaming fields of Bihar, VM was not burdened with any baggage from the London School of Social Democracy and the Gandhi-Nehru discourse of Congress socialism and Indian nationalism. His engagement with the Indian version of bourgeois democracy was that of a practical revolutionary forced to operate from within the system who however never allowed his analysis and vision to be limited by the ever narrowing horizon of bourgeois liberalism and constitutionalism. All his writings are therefore illumined by the remarkable clarity and sincerity of his revolutionary purpose.

His writings are also an object lesson in Marxist dialectics. It is his dialectical outlook which prevents him from becoming one-sided and dogmatic. He locates his objects of study in their relevant contexts and studies every aspect with remarkable objectivity. But this objectivity is not neutral and stationary, it is revolutionary and dynamic. The focus of his dialectics lies in grasping the small but developing positive aspect of every process and then turning the tables to transform it into the dominant and decisive aspect.

In his short speech at the funeral of Marx, Engels had used one single word as the most decisive description of the multi-dimensional and colourful creative personality of his departed comrade-in-arms. Marx was above all a revolutionary, Engels reminded his listeners. Later, Lenin also warned against the vulgarisation of Marxism. Robbed of its revolutionary core, Marxism would become lifeless and revisionist, he cautioned. VM was also above all a revolutionary and retrieving and enriching the revolutionary essence of Marxism was his most passionate and consistent mission.

The selected works of VM provide an abridged account of this unfinished mission of one of the greatest revolutionaries produced by the Indian communist movement. Pulsating with the spirit of a simmering revolution spilling over into the next millennium, these writings are dedicated to the onward march of revolutionary Marxism worldwide.

Dipankar Bhattacharya
General Secretary, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)

[Originally appeared in The Telegraph. From Liberation, January 1999.]

Other than politics which to me means the medium revealing the intricacies of society, I take a great deal of interest in cosmology where the universe unfolds itself in infinite space and time; where galaxies fast recede into the ever-disappearing frontiers of universe away from each other; where stars emerge, glow and explode to death; and where, quite apparently, motion is the mode of existence of matter.

Motion, i.e., change and transformation — always from a lower to a higher order — also, incidentally, forms the mode of existence of human society. No idea is absolute, no society is perfect. Whenever a society has been conceived as the embodiment of the absolute idea, shock waves emerging from deep within have shaken its very foundations. And then amidst the despair all around new dreams arise. Some dreams never come true as they are wild fantasies of the human mind, the ‘mind-in-itself’. The few which are realized are essentially abstract creations of the human mind, the ‘mind-for-itself’. Nonetheless, dreams, whether wild or plausible, have remained the source of human endeavour since perhaps the origin of humanity itself.

India of my dreams is essentially an integral India where a Pakistani Muslim won’t have to procure a visa in search of the roots of his evolution; where, likewise, for an Indian the great Indus Valley Civilisation does not fall in a foreign country; and where a Bengali Hindu refugee will finally shed the bitter memories of Dacca and a Bangladeshi Muslim will not be hounded as a foreign national in India.

Sounds like BJP? But then the BJP has only thrived upon the great division of the country — between a Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India, albeit not so ‘pure’. As BJP continues to stretch this division to extremes with all the disastrous consequences, great thinkers will surely arise in all the three countries and remould the public opinion for a brotherly reunion. And, be sure, that will be the doomsday for the forces like BJP.

In the India of my dreams, a Ganga and a Cauvery, and a Sindhu and a Brahmaputra, will freely flow into each other and the morning shall dawn to the jugalbandi of great musical tunes of India. Some statesman will then compile his notes into a "Re-Discovery of India".

India of my dreams shall rise in the community of nations as a country which the weakest of neighbours shall not fear and which the most powerful country in the world shall not be able to threaten or blackmail. This India will rank among the first five countries of the world in economic prowess as well as in Olympic tallies.

India of my dreams shall have a secular state which shall rest upon the principle of ‘Sarva Dharma Varjite’ rather than ‘Sarva Dharma Sambhav’. While not interfering with an individual’s faith, the state shall actively cultivate the scientific and rational world outlook.

Religion, as has rightly been said, is the expression of man’s powerlessness towards his environment. Its abolition therefore demands a thoroughgoing change in the material and spiritual conditions of life where man can stand up to acquire mastery over his environment. Whenever the conservative philosophical systems have burdened the people as deadweights, there have always come up in India great reformation movements. And thus I dream of a great resurgence of rational ideas where the human essence alienated in the form of God shall retrieve itself. This great reformation of human minds shall accompany a social revolution where the producers of wealth shall also be the masters of their produce.

In India of my dreams, glorification of pariahs as dalits will end and dalits will cease to be a category. Castes shall dissolve into classes with each of their members having individualized expression.

In India of my dreams, women shall constitute 50% of representative assemblies. Love marriages will be the rule and the divorce easier to obtain. Children will not know any misery and looking after them will be more the responsibility of the state than parents.

In India of my dreams, every town will have its cafeterias where intellectuals shall have hot discussions over cups of cold coffee! There, some anguished souls can gaze through the plumes of rising smoke conjuring up images of their heart-throbs while many insatiable hearts can be captivated by the interpretations of varied works of art and literature. While no work of art and literature will be subjected to state censorship, smoking shall be strictly prohibited everywhere, except, of course, the coffee houses!

To return to the original theme, in India of my dreams, an Indian spaceship will wade through the deep space while Indian scientists and mathematicians will be working out equations integrating into a whole the fundamental forces of nature.

Finally, for me the mother of all dreams is a motherland where political liberty of each of its citizens will be valued most; where dissent will be considered legitimate and where Tiananmens of the system will be handled by the morally strong statesmen and unarmed forces of people’s militia.

India of my dreams is built upon the fundamental processes at work within the Indian society and for whose realization many like me are committed to the last drop of their blood.